For once, the festive family visits were not dominated by drivers telling me of their misfortunes on the B7816 or the nippy little route they have found to get around Colchester.

Instead the talk was very much of online shopping and the joys and delights of the likes of Yodel and the unfortunate CityLink. If there was ever a case of the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” being utterly disregarded, this was it.

Having spent an unusual amount of time at home in the last month, I was actually pretty impressed at how good the services of Royal Mail, Yodel and, in particular, DPD/Interlink actually were.

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Most goods arrived when they were meant to arrive and those that were delayed slightly kept me informed by text or email.

But when it came to the actual retailers, there was a much more mixed series of stories.

Asos, Amazon and The Book People seemed to come top of the lists around my family and friends. John Lewis did what it said it would with particular success from its haberdashery department.

Selfridges actually managed to deliver with some style, Penhaligon’s was sturdily and beautifully wrapped and Majestic even checked that it could deliver direct to one of my family without spoiling the surprise.

Even underfire Tesco’s Direct service managed to replace damaged goods well before the big day.

The butt of everyone’s complaints, however, was Marks & Spencer. The tales were legion: orders placed at the start of December that would not arrive until after Christmas, goods that suddenly became unavailable; orders unilaterally cancelled.

It is this, rather than the expected 14th consecutive quarter of falling sales in general merchandise, which should worry investors and chief executive Mark Bolland when he reports on seasonal trading on Thursday.

Unless my family is particularly atypical, people shop with Marks not because they are hugely price conscious or massively fashion savvy. Instead they are looking for reliable quality at a fair price with a no-quibbles returns policy for those unwanted gifts.

But this year many customers received an unreliable online service and a confusing series of different daily price cuts only in stores.

This is the kind of treatment I reckon the typical M&S customer will not forget for the next 350 days and won’t have forgiven by next Christmas.

Indeed, it was interesting to look around after the great unwrapping ceremony and spot where the prized clothing gifts were.

With the odd designer exception, there was one particular retailer whose clothes dominated. The retailer in question? Primark. And it doesn’t even do online.

Ring-fencing must not stop banks funding UK’s recovery

Tomorrow is the deadline for our major banks to deliver their proposals to the Bank of England on how they intend to ring-fence their High Street operations from their riskier, investment banking-type business.

The plans follow on from the Vickers Commission and are part of the myriad, regulatory pressures to ensure we never again suffer the kind of banking failures we saw in 2008.

The BoE has said that the banks’ plans should “ideally include provisional UK holding company and UK-regulated entity balance sheets and profit and loss statements, enabling supervisors to assess the viability and sustainability of the entities and their level of going and gone-concern capitalisation”.

Although we will not see these first proposals, the likelihood is they will be heavy on principals and light on details. After all, the banks are coming in with something they will not have to implement at the operational level until January 1, 2019.

However, they may well give some clues not only as to how the banks plan to carry out ring-fencing but also the shape they see themselves in four years from now. Lloyds may have the simplest task, Royal Bank of Scotland will reflect its continuing shrinking investment bank while Barclays and HSBC will have the most complex tales to tell.

Ring-fencing still looks the most practical approach to de-risking our High Street banks. But it must not get in the way of them growing their businesses and funding an ever-fragile economic recovery.